Why Healthcare Marketing is Stuck in the Past (And How to Catch Up)

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex: Welcome back to my three listeners. I’ve met two of them over the last month, which is very exciting, and I’m excited to meet the third. I don’t know when that day will come. Kent, welcome to Ignite.

Kent Mora: Thank you, Alex. I’m looking forward to it.

Alex: We’ll see at the end of it, if it is as exciting as you were hoping.

Kent: Likewise.

Alex: Kent, where do you ply your trade? What have you done historically? You live in one of the most beautiful parts. I love mountains in Maine and Colorado, but, man, Huntington Beach ain’t bad. How are you doing?

Kent: I’m doing pretty good, yes. You asked a bunch of different questions right there. I’m going to get into a bunch of different stuff here. Where do I ply my trade? I ply it throughout the United States. I’ve been involved in direct-to-consumer marketing for 25 years. Started off as a chief financial officer. We can get into that if we want to. I’ve been focused on marketing and advertising for 20 years. You know what?

None of my clients want to live in the most beautiful part of the United States here in Huntington Beach. I just recently moved to Huntington Beach. If you really want to get into beautiful, I spent the last seven years living not only in Orange County, not only in Newport Beach, but on Balboa Island. That’s pretty cool. None of my clients are usually ever here. I do a lot of East Coast stuff, early morning, a lot of traveling. I really enjoy it. It’s a lot of fun.

Alex: Historically, you’ve gone from CFO, you did the numbers, to now doing numbers for marketers. Tell us a little bit about that. Do you like the DSO space? What do you like about multi-site?

Kent: You know what’s interesting is I like the DSO space. It was pretty interesting. I came in looking at really largely DSOs, in particular, multi-site organizations. I really applied my fundamentals and my mindset there. Not so much, “Okay, this is DSO, it’s totally different.” That’s not the mindset you need to take. At its basic level, this is direct-to-consumer marketing and advertising. This is no different than anything else I’ve done anywhere else. Sure, we’re looking at really a heavy retail-based location, geotargeting, things of that nature. How we interact with our consumers, how we build the journey out, how we create lifetime value, it’s all the same. It’s not that different.

Alex: You just got to do it within the HIPAA. That’s the only difference.

Kent: You know what’s funny is I have two different views of that. Number one, yes, there are some things you have to deal with HIPAA-related. You just got to be cognizant of it. I will apply common sense to most HIPAA once you understand the fundamentals of it. Number two, what I saw a lot of people doing is using HIPAA as a crutch. They were so afraid of a HIPAA violation because they didn’t understand HIPAA well enough that they stopped from moving forward on a lot of ventures. That’s my experience. I’ve seen that.

Alex: Give me more specifics. Measurement, advertising, attribution, where have you seen it hold people up? What would you do differently?

Kent: Messaging. I think a lot of people confuse messaging-specific modalities and really problems. Let’s go to fundamentals of marketing advertising. When you’re looking to create lead generation, you’re taking your product and your service and you’re making it the best solution to a problem that’s out there in the environment. When you’re dealing in healthcare, a lot of people think, “Okay, well, that’s really a HIPAA violation, if you’re specific to certain problems that people are having.”

No, it’s not really. A lot of people are out there going, “I have a problem with this, I have a problem with that, ow, my tooth hurts, DSO-related,” or whatever it could be in healthcare. I also worked for a nonprofit for a number of years that was in rare disease. That was also healthcare-related. That is specific to Duchenne muscular dystrophy. That’s your problem that people are creating. That’s the intent.

When we’re advertising, we’re looking for people that have an intent, looking for a solution to a problem. Don’t let HIPAA get in your way. It’s not the big, bad, ugly beast out there. Just understand what it is and move forward.

Alex: Force yourself to understand. Go sit with the lawyers, take the training. All of our colleagues have to take training and sit with the lawyers. In practical application, you need to go through things and talk to legal team and other marketers. I really advise everybody. Go hit five marketers this week on LinkedIn, that are in healthcare. They’ll give you tips on how they accomplished it.

I love it, Kent. I think people are too afraid of it. If you apply common sense, like you said, you can achieve most things in healthcare marketing. That’s a myth you’d love to prove wrong. I love it. What is something you are really excited in healthcare marketing or otherwise in the coming year?

Kent: You know what? I’m going to be a little controversial here. [unintelligible 00:05:08] come out swinging. Sorry to the healthcare marketers that are out there in the industry as a whole. I used to do a lot of business in Canada. I would always tease my counterparts that Canada was five years behind the United States. It was just something we joked about all the time. The more I get involved in healthcare marketing, the more I have the same opinion.

It’s like healthcare marketing is a little behind of traditional marketing, that’s out there. I don’t understand why. Maybe it’s the big, bad HIPAA boogeyman syndrome that’s out there. There is so much technology that’s out there that can be applied to healthcare that is available right now. The fact that a lot of people aren’t taking advantage of it, they’re so caught up into the niche of healthcare. This is how we’ve always done it. This is the compliance that we need to live within. We have to be so rigid. We can’t ever do anything else. It’s like, I feel like your healthcare is five years behind. Come on, guys. Let’s get up here.

Alex: Absolutely. It’s part of why I like these discussions because it’s easy to bring innovation when it’s a little bit behind. I think it’s a HIPAA thing. I think people and healthcare marketers are very mission-driven too. We honestly don’t want to violate anyone’s personal identification or make them feel weird that we serve them in that specific to a condition we know they have that no one should know they have.

I think part of it is HIPAA. I think part of it is people are being very conscious. Part of it is we do need to bring more retail marketers into the space to drive us forward because we get better at marketing. We’re going to connect more patients with care. That’s what everybody wants to do. You’re a big believer in messaging. You really think that a brand position and the messaging is critical to patient acquisition.

Kent: 100%. You got to understand, I’ve been doing direct-to-consumer marketing for 25 years. It’s measurable. I do all of my moves and my advertising based on a return on investment. Branding in my world is secondary. If you do your job appropriately and you generate revenues or in the healthcare industry or DSO, if you create the revenues and production, the brand is going to come along with it. If you don’t do the other appropriately, the branding just doesn’t come. It’s very difficult and very expensive to take the other direction and build brand and expect your revenue to come along with it.

We went through this time where we came out of mass marketing in the ’50s and the ’60s where we lost our measurements with the television coming into everybody’s homes. We lost measurements that we had prior to that. Direct-to-consumer goes back 100 years, folks. Pick up a book. If you look at when we started to get into really direct response television in the ’80s became measurable. Then you had the digital transformation, even more measurable. People started to take note of it. Yet, you still had this lingering ’70s, ’80s, ’90s executive crew that was so mass marketing brand focused that they didn’t either understand or didn’t want to understand the measurable side of the marketing as it was swinging back around. There’s still a little bit of a divergence out there.

Alex: Healthcare marketers, what’s up? It’s Alex from the future. Guess what? Scaling Up, the Healthcare Performance Marketing Summit is back. Scaling Up is focused entirely on driving patient acquisition to your group. You’re talking the largest provider group, health system leaders, everything it takes to drive a patient to your practice or health system from media, BI, analytics, performance creative, SEO, AI, because we’ve got to have that acronym in there.

October 28th and 29th, thousands of healthcare marketers are going to be showing up to this. It’s virtual, and it is free. That’s the best part. Last two years, we were charging for it. This year, I want every healthcare market to come. We need to connect more patients with care. We all do. We all need to do it together. I’ll see you there Scaling Up.

You’re a big believer, measure first, demand capture first. Is that what you’re saying? Get the groundwork, strive appointments to see you have online schedule, and then make sure brand is on point, run brand advertising. It should come second. All of the brand stuff should come second after performance, drive production, then brand. Make sure messaging and copy, all of that stuff is on point according to what kind of practice it is. Is that your order of business for other marketers out there that are trying to build up an MSO or DSO?

Kent: Yes, and with any other business. I’ll give you an example. I was at SHEEX a couple of years ago. I was brought in to really launch television, and then I took over their entire marketing department. It was such a fun engagement. Here’s my point in what we did. They had digital advertising with a big agency, and [unintelligible 00:09:55] that we promote. Great company. Anyways, they had digital

advertising. They had their website, they had their Amazon Marketplace, but they were adding television to it.

They didn’t know of anything about television. Not a fault of theirs, it just wasn’t in their sweet spot. I came in with my mindset of, “Let’s do everything on an ROI-measurable basis.” We got everything solidified on the digital end, Amazon Marketplace. We started with $20,000 in ad buys for television. Then we tweaked it. We went back out and we started ramping up. We started finding, “Okay, our messaging is working. We’re converting and we are also doubling down on the stations that are working really well for us.”

We built that from $20,000 a week to probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $350,000 to $500,000 a week in ad spend just on television. Then we go to the retail convention out in Las Vegas and we had big store there, storefront, SHEEX, everything, over and over and over again. People walked in, didn’t know who SHEEX were but just saw one of our television ad.

This was a retail business-to-business. Excellent. Why? That’s the power of, get the measurement right first and then the brand will follow. Their retail relationships worked out even better just off of the base of that. I’m not some Superman. I was taught these skills back in the late ’90s, but it’s the same today.

Alex: Sometimes measurement can be directional. If you’ve got linear and some billboards, all of the kind of traditional stuff, I’m a big believer that when a brand is good, it helps drive demand. [unintelligible 00:11:46] more people looking for the brand or the cheapest leads. Sometimes directional uplift is good enough measurement. These markets that were running all this stuff increased in production. Does that work? Do you have to have a tracking all the way through? Are you a believer of that or it’s segmenting markets, or did you know exactly? It sounded like you ran TV here. The market increased out there. Let’s keep doubling down on TV spend.

Kent: Yes, in that engagement, it was fairly basic. They have been running digital for long enough. We knew what our baselines were. We got it. Amazon was. When we poured gas on the fire, we knew what lift was across the board.

Alex: I love it, guys. You heard what Kent said right there, is get your digital in order. Get the measurement in order for all of that stuff. Then when you start layering on the less trackable stuff, direction you’re going to know. You’re going to have some markets running those things and others, hopefully you’ve segmented out that are not. You’re going to see production generally increase or not.

Kent: In fact, you really got to understand your baselines. You mentioned some out-of-home type advertising. You can track it to a certain degree. You can have a 100 numbers or certain URLs. You’re still dealing with a lot of gray area noise. You think you know, but if you have your fundamentals down, you can see the impact of it through lift but you got to have the technology. You got to have the right people manning the levers. That’s when things actually get a lot of fun, to be quite honest.

Alex: We’re getting a big push from certain clients, actually prospects that we keep losing that want us to do traditional media planning. We’ve been digital only for 16½ years and a 100 people doing it. I’m nervous to branch out, but I think it’ll be fun and it’s necessary to do great patient acquisition. We do the hard thing, in my opinion, well, which is to merit [unintelligible 00:13:29] measurement in the HIPAA constraints and all that stuff but traditional media planning and all the other [unintelligible 00:13:32] it’s important. I think we overlooked that market.

Kent: Especially, if you’re talking DSO and you have certain regions that you’re in. Some of the non-traditional stuff is really, really important, I think. One of the things, because I talk to a ton of different agencies, and it seems to be the same mindset. It’s applied in two different ways. One is, and I talk a lot about television with these digital agencies. Part of them are like, they’re just not true believers in television. Digital is the way, it’s always going to be the way, and it’s like, “All right, good luck to you.”

The other part, I’ve been talking to somebody recently. I won’t say who it is. Really smart guy, incredibly growth-oriented agency. What he said to me a couple of days ago, he goes, “I want to do all of it. I want to conquer the world, but I have to realize what we are at our core and what we do best.” He said, “That’s why I think if I just continue to grow in that direction and then as my client needs come along and I grow in relationships with people who are expert in those areas, I think for me that’s the better way to do it.” I’ll just share with you what I’m hearing at other agencies.

Alex: That’s good, the cooperating thing. “I don’t know what to do.” That’s a 2026 planning. Do some Ayahuasca in the desert and figure it all out. I’m just kidding. We don’t do drugs on this podcast. That’s helpful. We’ll see the way the world goes. Talking back to digital. I only got you for a few more minutes. What was your favorite parts of digital that drove patient acquisition, as this is a patient acquisition podcast. Our four listeners are dying to know what worked best. You guys are pretty sophisticated. I see online booking all through this. What was your best type of media mix that really conquered things for you guys?

Kent: I just want to point out that you moved from three listeners to four listeners. I’d like to take credit for increasing your listener base by 25%. Anyway, we’ll take advantage of that. With West Coast Dental, it was really interesting because you got to understand who your client base is and what you do well. We’ll use them as an example. I’m not saying this across the board for all DSOs. For them, page search. Page search was incredible. You get a [unintelligible 00:15:50] with digital agencies. A lot of times they’re like, “Man, if I could get you to do a five, six, seven row as, we’re smoking.”

They were above that. Again, we weren’t Superman. We just happened to really key into what was working, double down on it, iterate it, and we did a good job. Now, there’s a push to utilize social media a lot, but social media loses the intent base part of the advertising. People are searching for something. They’re casually in that category and they may or may not have a need for your services. I tend to rely on social media more as a retargeting tool depending on how big your budget is, rather than a first-touch type-advertising.

Alex: Most DSOs or retailer healthcare really have got a focus on demand capture stuff anyways. We hardly ever see that hitting diminishing returns until you get to the larger companies with a larger spend. I’m happy to see yes, PBC Google ads still work. In dental, you have LSAs as well. You got to PMax the whole thing. Dental has almost the whole suite.

Kent: PMaxwas awesome for DSOs. It was really working well.

Alex: You mentioned something guys, and this is the key to all of these things, especially stuff like PMax. You have to feed it back the right signal, so I’m going to assume with all my tracking call and lead from their feeding back only net new patient appointment so the algo was learning of what a really good appointment is and not just mama calling back again to schedule.

Kent: That is a phenomenal point right there because part of the challenge that I’ve seen working with healthcare is they don’t have a thorough analytics capture from advertising to booking appointment, to becoming a customer. Part of it falls off because of HIPAA when we go beyond that curtain, and then feeding that data back into your marketing department so that we can make educated decisions on what we’re doing.

Alex: That’s right. Guys, that’s the key to measurement and the tracking. It ain’t sexy, but when you get into the new gig, you got to convince them to get the measurement and tracking, so you know what a net new patient appointments from online schedule calling lead for him because if you don’t, you can never scale in your advertising. The more you know with Kent today.

Kent: If you do it properly, it can be sexy.

Alex: It can be sexy and your COO will love it and your CMO and your C-suite will love it and your CFO will love you because you’re going to give them a dash where it says you spent this and you got this many net new patient appointments. If there’s a problem with the company, it ain’t on me as the marketer. That’s cool, guys. The [unintelligible 00:18:22] tracking, the COOs love it because they’re going to have a dashboard with the right tracking partners that shows agents that are converting well, call center efficiency, which locations are and are not booking and by what rates and why they’re not, do we not have the right insurances? Are they not enough members? Are we targeting the wrong zip codes? The tracking matters, the humans matter more. Kent, thank you for joining us on Ignite.

Kent: Loved being here. Alex thanks for having me.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing? Subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.